Barefoot in Benares: Letters from India by Predrag Cicovacki

Barefoot in Benares: Letters from India is an intimate record of a five-month journey through India undertaken during the author’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship in 2012–2013. Arriving in search of a deeper understanding of nonviolence, he encounters a country in which beauty and squalor, spirituality and social injustice, serenity and chaos exist side by side without ever canceling one another. What begins as a travel journal gradually becomes a philosophical pilgrimage—and an inquiry into what it means to live fully and authentically as a human being.

Written with candor, humor, and an alertness to the revealing details of everyday life, the book follows the author from Delhi and the ghats of Benares to Rajasthan, Santiniketan, Odisha, Chennai, Puducherry, and other places of cultural and spiritual significance. He teaches and lectures, visits temples and ashrams, studies Gandhi, Tagore, Jainism, and Hindu traditions, and reflects on poverty, violence, religion, education, death, human dignity, and the uneasy encounter between East and West. Yet the book’s most memorable discoveries often arise from ordinary meetings—with students, monks and nuns, cooks, drivers, merchants, children, and strangers.

India neither confirms the author’s expectations nor permits him to remain a detached observer. Its overwhelming vitality forces him to question his habits, assumptions, and need for comfort. By the end of the journey, the mystical is no longer understood as an escape from the world or a dissolution of the self, but as a genuine encounter with reality—above all, with another human being. Barefoot in Benares is therefore both a vivid portrait of India and a deeply personal meditation on difference, reverence, and the mysterious gift of being alive.